TD-SCDMA not a rival to other standards
November 5, 2002
Siemens AG executive Peter Borger does not see China's home grown
next generation standard (TD-SCDMA) as a rival to established standards
but instead will complement them. He believes TD-SCDMA, mainly developed
by Siemens AG and Datang, has a distinctive advantage over Europe's
WCDMA.
"TD-SCDMA is good in cities with high concentrations of users like
in China. It's not as necessary in places in Germany where I come
from. It complements WCDMA," he said. "They will not compete with
each other because they're both part of the GSM family,"
Siemens and Datang plan to spend a total of $170 million in TD-SCDMA
research. The Chinese government will also invest in the standard
which they have strongly backed.
Some criticised the new standard because TD-SCDMA handsets cannot
be used on 3G system in other countries and is no better than other
standards.
China has allocated two blocks of spectrum, totaling 55-MHz of
bandwidth, to TD-SCDMA technology. The other standards, WCDMA and
cdma2000 1x were each granted a 60-MHz block. The favorable allocation
for TD-SCDMA is a sign that the government is serious about making
sure it has some IP involvement in the mobile space.
The likely scenario will be that Chinese operators would deploy
a mixture of 3G networks in 2004 -- TD-SCDMA, WCDMA as well as the
CDMA2000 standard.
TD-SCDMA is the third standard approved by the ITU. Some say it
is more bandwidth efficient than the other technologies, at least
20 percent cheaper to implement and has higher data transfer rates
for Internet access.
Support for the Chinese standard is not guaranteed. Chinese operator
Unicom has invested in CDMA2000 technology and likely to upgrade
to CDMA2000 1x networks. On the other hand China Mobile is rolling
out GPRS services and likely to deploy WCDMA in the future. Only
a handful of companies are actively researching network backbone
and handsets. All these have led to speculation over whether the
standard can ever achieve the critical mass necessary to be a success
in the market.
Even so, some companies are developing TD-SCDMA equipment in case
the technology does take off in China.
To encourage further research and development, Datang said it would
share IP with the alliance formed. In addition, the government has
decided to allocate an extra 100-MHz block to TD-SCDMA, but that
must be shared with other applications.
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